Friday, 27 March 2009

Ignorance in the 2008 NZ Election

The Electoral Commission has released a survey conducted by Colmar Brunton on voter satisfaction with the 2008 election. The survey also included some interesting data on how well voters understand their electoral system. Some highlights:

Only 30% of voters rated MMP as difficult or very difficult to understand but:

48% failed to list the Party Vote as deciding the number of MPs

70% failed to list either winning 5% of the Party Vote or winning one electorate as being required to cross the threshold

Males, those with a University degree, and those with a higher income level were more likely to answer correctly. These results are consistent with my work on the 2005 NZES survey.

I'm hoping to be able to get the underlying dataset to check the independent effects of the covariates in this survey to compare against what I've found in the 2005 data. I'm also curious to see whether rating MMP as difficult to understand correlated with getting the knowledge questions wrong. Stay tuned.HT: Kiwiblog